Leaf cutter bees are solitary bees and have long been known to improve pollination of alfalfa and like leguminosae pasture for seed. Leaf cutter bees, however, are not averse to living amongst their own kind. Each female constructs a cigar-like shaped cell inside blind tunnels or pre-existing holes.
In the prior art devices a plurality of laminated sheets or boards of wood having holes drilled therethrough, were used by managers of leaf cutter bee propagation stations. Nowadays, it is common to use rectangular blocks of molded thermal plastics having holes extending the entire thickness of the block at spaced apart intervals.
In a typical field shelter, the walls of such a shelter are lined with such blocks and the rear portion of the block is covered with a paper or some other similar substance to create closed ended tunnels.
Each bee shelter may contain as many as 20 or 25 such blocks and each block may contain up to 2500 tunnels or apertures for nesting.
Since all of the tunnels are identical in shape and form, there is often some difficulty for the bees to find their own particular nesting tunnel and progeny, amongst the many thousands of tunnels in the same shelter.
It has been found to be advantageous and of assistance to the bees to paint various forms of different colors and shapes with different colored backgrounds on the front face or entrance side of the blocks. It has been established that leaf cutter bees can recognize colors and geometric forms. It has thus long been the practice of farmers to use stencils to paint varying patterns on a background of different color on the face or entrance side of the blocks. This aids the bees in orienting themselves to their tunnels on return to the nest Typically, the forms may be a blue color on a black background. A typical stencil used for such painting is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,787,108, FIG. 7.
The problem with creating this type of orientation is that it is extremely time and labor consuming as each block must be painted by the farmer or keeper of the bees.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to create a block which is capable of orienting leaf cutter bees but which does not require painting by the farmer prior to use.